Make You Better
by SkywardShadow
Summary: Sasuke still feels like he's betraying them sometimes. (Oneshot, Post-Finale; companion to 'Bricks and Boys')


Sasuke still feels like he's betraying them sometimes.

Every day that goes by, every day Konoha is still in one piece and not burnt to ashes like the bodies of his family, he wonders if he made the right decision in letting it stand.

It wasn't that he suddenly had a change of heart, bleeding out at the Valley of the End with Naruto doing the same beside him. It wasn't that he found it within himself to forgive the village for everything they had done or hadn't done. Konoha had caused his clan to be annihilated. It had drenched his brother's hands in blood and shame, it had fucked him up beyond all hope of repair. Konoha was guilty.

It still is. That hasn't changed.

_I lost._

Sasuke looks back on that admission and wonders.

When he'd said it, he hadn't been giving up his conviction that the village elders—the village itself—deserved the same death and destruction that they had judged his family worthy of. Everything Naruto ever told him, all those words about friendship and bonds and every other topic he would wax poetic on, given half a chance—those hadn't invalidated Sasuke's hatred.

They still haven't.

Sasuke heard a lot of talk to the contrary during his trial, a small handful of very stubborn people who insisted that he'd "given up" that hatred when he hadn't. He'd just given up his hopes of revenge. They weren't the same thing.

He'd just been so damn tired.

And that had always been Naruto's biggest advantage. When it came to stubbornness, to pushing a point until you were ready to give in just to make him shut the hell up for five seconds, no one could match him. Not even Sasuke.

So instead of giving his hatred up, he'd given it over to Naruto. And Naruto had turned it into motivation. He'd used it to rip down the last shreds of the old Konoha, starting with the dismissal of the elders not an hour after his inauguration as Hokage. A new counsel had been formed in their place.

(It was months ago, but Sasuke remembers perfectly what Naruto's face had looked like when he'd told him the news. He'd been trying so hard to act like it was just an aside, like Sasuke's opinion on his political decisions didn't mean a damn thing, but he'd been twitchy as hell and as easy to see through as ever.

Not that Sasuke had been in much of a position to mock him for it. His hands had started shaking halfway through the conversation, and they hadn't stopped until he was asleep in his bed.)

He had entrusted Naruto with all of his hopeless fury, his bitter anger, his desire to see everything burn; he had trusted him to change things, to make sure that another Uchiha Sasuke never rose from the ashes of a dead clan.

And by and large, Naruto has. After all, keeping his word, as he's always been fond of loudly reminding people, is part of his Ninja Way.

Sasuke is meandering down the streets of the village and thinking about this because Naruto just dragged him in for a meeting, where 'meeting' was code for 'spring new information on Sasuke that will probably give him a heart attack but I'm Uzumaki Naruto and I don't think about shit like that'.

There hadn't been anyone else in the room. He'd just shoved a scroll across the desk, looking anywhere but Sasuke's eyes.

_Designs_, he'd said. _For the Uchiha memorial_.

Sasuke's mind had mostly shut down after that. He thinks he chose one of the designs and maybe mumbled an opinion on a location, but he couldn't swear to it.

_This is how I wanna start. No more sweeping this kind of shit under the rug. That's not how Konoha's going to be anymore._

Something about the way Naruto said that made Sasuke think of a thirteen-year-old boy in a hideously loud orange jumpsuit. It said with perfect clarity that this was the way things were going to be, and woe betide anyone who tried to get in his way.

Things are changing, Sasuke reflects. And their new Hokage has done nothing to make Sasuke think he made the wrong choice, that his faith had been misplaced.

But there's still that creeping feeling of betrayal.

It happens when he's not expecting it. When he's passing a food stand and suddenly all he can think about is how much his mother loved onigiri. When he sees a square of paint on a wall, fresher than the paint around it, and wonders if an Uchiha crest used to be there. When he goes to train by the Nakano River and remembers Itachi going there with Shisui, their cousin shooing Sasuke away when he tried to join in.

And he wonders—he can't not—if they would have understood the choice he made then, dying and drained and utterly exhausted by a decade of seeking revenge.

He wonders if they would have approved. Or if they all would have looked at him the way his father used to, disappointed but not particularly surprised.

He still has nightmares sometimes.

They're not nearly as frequent as they used to be, but they still happen—he'll wake up swallowing screams and sweating through his sheets, the images of his parents' corpses fading too slowly from memory. Or the image of his brother's last smile before he slid to the ground, dying in front of Sasuke's eyes.

Sasuke hasn't forgotten. There are days he doesn't even know if he's managed the forgiving part.

Naruto wants to put up a memorial so that the name of Uchiha will be remembered the way it should. _A headstone_, some part of his mind snarls, _a single stitch for a gaping wound. Is that enough to make up for what they did? Can that ever really be enough?_

Sasuke hasn't forgotten. He remembers cousins, aunts and uncles splayed out in the road like rag dolls tossed aside; he remembers his mother's lifeblood staining the slats in the floor and the rictus of his father's mouth and tears on Itachi's face—

But remembers other things too.

Naruto calling him family, swearing to change the way Konoha was run. Itachi looking him in the eye with embarrassing fondness, even as the world's foundations trembled around them, even as Sasuke watched him die for the second time. A forehead pressed gently against his own.

_I will always love you._

No matter the choices he makes. No matter if he renders his family's sacrifice moot, no matter if he had chosen to prove that Konoha was right to destroy them.

He made his choice a long time ago.

_Can that ever really be enough?_

_No_, Sasuke thinks, his feet absently changing course. It seems like a good day to visit the memorial stones. _No, it can't._

_But it's a start._


End file.
